Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds, VR & Internet culture

Thursday, August 07, 2014

Philip Rosedale on How Virtual Reality Can Become as Mass Market as TVs & Smartphones by 2021

A lot of people were skeptical about Philip Rosedale's prediction that we could get 1 billion virtual reality users by 2021, so I asked Philip to expand. What gives him confidence that VR will be as rapidly adopted as smartphones? After all, I pointed out to him, smartphone adoption was so fast because it combined an intuitive touch interface with two already existing, familiar necessities -- calling/texting and web browsing. How's VR follow that pattern?

"My thinking is based partly on looking at graphs like this," he tells me, passing along a link to the technology adoption chart abbreviated above. "I think what is happening is that when something is created that has great utility to everyone in comparison to its initial cost (like the TV or the smartphone), the overall technology trends around manufacture and distribution are driving the diffusion rate up to a point where great things will go from early adoption (10% penetration) to saturation (90% penetration) in a time period of just a few years. Another great example which is a subset of the 'Internet' item on that graph is the rise of broadband connectivity to the Internet, which also require new hardware."

And that last bit is a particularly good point:

Broadband Internet connectivity was quickly adopted within the first 7 or so years of it first being available. Philip continues:

"And I believe that Virtual Reality will have broad and significant utility to everyone in a manner similar to the smartphone or to broadband. This statement is of course a prediction, because we have not yet seen the 'killer apps' in VR that will drive this behavior. But I think that Second Life has already demonstrated categories of use - for example live performance - that are very likely to become killer apps if the adoption barrier is driven to nearly zero by new hardware like the HMD." (We saw an example of virtual reality-driven live performance the other day, on Philip's High Fidelity.)

Overall, I'd say this is a good case for mass adoption, especially if the first few years of Oculus Rift on the market are strong. Decent smartphones are now given away by carriers for free, and if early results are promising, I can see them offering VR HMDs for an equally good bargain.

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"Decent smartphones are now given away by carriers for free, and if early results are promising, I can see them offering VR HMDs for an equally good bargain."

I hope VR doesn't catch on like smartphones. The reason carriers can give away decent smartphones for free is because they expect to earn their money back over time with service. Most carriers require long term service contracts in exchange for the smartphone. I don't think this pricing model would be good or practical for VR.

Naturally, "Potsie" Phil doesn't take into account that the Internet is getting SLOWER for everyone, that providers are making it MORE expensive to get a connection and generally conspiring to control the Internet.

Nor does he take into account that real wages in the real world are shrinking and that most people rent and therefore need to move often.

More importantly, his tech-gobblyd-gook is so transparently phoney, that nobody will buy it.

The logrithmic scale of the y axis of that chart makes it very difficult to read accurately. Flatten it out to a linear scale and it's not nearly as impressive.

Live music IS a compelling use-case for immersive tech, but not necessarily VR. I could see live concerts incorporating 3D cameras to allow viewers to watch the show in from the front row (or backstage... or onstage), perhaps incorporating an interactive element to allow them to adjust their POV freely.

But that's not the SL paradigm of independent musicians puppeteering their avatars while sitting in the spare bedroom in their PJs. There's mass-market potential in convergence between SL-style performance and the idoru phenomenon, but I don't think that'll happen until we have significantly more cultural cross-pollination from Japan, Korea and other Eastern cultures.

I DO absolutely believe that immersive VR is coming and it's going to be huge. I just think it's going to be a more gradual adoption curve than Philip is projecting.

Philip Rosedale has always been amazing when he drags out his crystal ball. Only a fool would doubt him.

After he correctly predicted the astounding success of Second Life, he abruptly departed for LoveMachine Inc., then back to Second Life to usher in worldwide domination for the company. Then he abruptly departed the virtual world for his mega-successful Coffee and Power. Now the pull of his devotion to virtual worlds has brought him home. Not really home, but more like a replacement for home. It's going to be HUGE! It always is.

Why's VR, a category of software, being compared to home appliances and other physical hardware? I think we mean HMDs.

As Arcadia points out, HMDs will have use cases outside of virtual reality. As a sports fan, I got excited about the future of the Rift when Zuckerberg mentioned possibilities like virtual attendance of football games. People like me already pay for premium sport channels and online streaming services for games that aren't local. If I could put on an Oculus Rift and my headphones and suddenly a 3D camera or whatever lets me see and hear games all around the world as if I were in the stands that'd be very compelling. At least it'd be a slightly more interesting value proposition of what I'm already paying for. And that's all it needs to be.

I'd bet on ideas like virtual attendance over virtual reality. Not to put the latter down given I'm very much engaged with it, but when we're talking about gaining the interest of and offering value to 1 billion people, I believe ideas like teens slipping on HMDs and getting the illusion of being 20 feet from One Direction will get us there much more likely than a virtual boy band no matter how great facial animation tracking gets.

So the success of HMDs has to be separated from the success of virtual reality. It's quite possible that virtual reality of Second Life's DNA will be as niche on the Oculus Rift as it has been on PCs. There's more than a billion PC users in the world but that doesn't mean much for present day VR.